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Tag: zines

Nathan

The Viva Help Parcel

Update

Viva Survivors has almost 2500 posts of viva help. There’s also the old podcast archive, resources and more. If you need viva help there is a lot of it freely available on this site! I’ve created a few publications too:

  • Keep Going – A Viva Survivors Anthology was first published in May 2022 and is my first big collection of Viva Survivors posts, the best of five years of the daily blog.
  • 101 Steps To A Great Viva is the zine that I Kickstarted last summer. Surprisingly it has 101 steps to a great viva! 101 practical steps any candidate can take to help get ready for their viva.

Following a few recent requests I’ve made my last print copies of both Keep Going – A Viva Survivors Anthology and 101 Steps To A Great Viva available for sale as a bundle that I’ll send to your letterbox 🙂

Front cover of "Keep Going - A Viva Survivors Anthology" by Nathan Ryder. Shows five postgraduate researchers sat around a table doing various research-related tasks. Cover by Maria Stoian

If you want print copies of these two helpful viva publications then go to this link – Viva Help Parcel – and look at the images and description to see if they might be for you. I suppose the questions to consider are:

  • Do you want a book of 150+ blog posts from the Viva Survivors blog?
  • Do you want a zine with 101 practical actions to help your viva?
  • And do you want both of these sent to you through the post?

If you answer yes to any of these then please check out the Viva Help Parcel, available with UK shipping included for £20. There are very limited quantities available and I have no current plans to produce more. Thank you for reading!

Cover of 101 Steps To A Great Viva

And PS: If you’re looking for ebooks or pdfs then you can find those here! 🙂

Nathan

Zine Time

Daily Post

I like zines! Small publications, often made with passion, often made because the creator has to make them once they’ve had the idea. I got interested through role-playing games zines. I made some in that area before I made The Viva Prep Handbook and The tiny book of viva prep.

A zine is a good small project: you have an idea for something that you want to exist and a series of problems to solve to make it real. Everything from content curation through to publishing is an interesting, stretching little challenge. You can learn a lot by making a zine.

For some researchers, a PhD thesis is like a really big zine – you make it because you have to, you have an itch that has to be scratched, a drive to make something that wasn’t there before (and you do nearly all of the work yourself!).

And I have a hunch that making a zine about your thesis could be a really interesting way to prepare for the viva – and share something about your research with others! Not a paper, not “just” an introduction, but a meaningful beginner’s guide maybe. I need to think about this more. There might be some future posts on this topic, but if you decide to play with the idea in the mean time, let me know.

Finally, I have a new zine project that I hope to share in the next few months, so watch this space!